WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge has dealt a blow to the Justice Department’s efforts to seek a new indictment against former FBI Director James Comey, temporarily barring prosecutors from using evidence they relied on when they initially secured criminal charges.
Saturday night’s decision by US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly does not preclude the department from trying again soon to indict Comey, but suggests that prosecutors may have to do so without citing communications between Comey and a close friend, Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman.
Comey was accused in September of lying to Congress when he denied authorizing an associate to serve as an anonymous source for media coverage of the FBI. In continuing the case, prosecutors cited text messages between Comey and Richman that they said showed Comey urging Richman to engage with the media for certain FBI-related coverage.
The case was dismissed last month after a different federal judge ruled that the prosecutor who brought the charges, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed by the Trump administration. But that sentence left open the possibility that the government could try again to seek charges against Comey, who has long been an enemy of President Donald Trump.
After the case was thrown out, Richman’s lawyers sought a court order barring prosecutors from continuing to access his computer files, which the Justice Department obtained through search warrants in 2019 and 2020 as part of a media leak investigation that was later closed without charges.
But Richman and his lawyers say that in preparing the criminal case against Comey, the prosecutors relied on data that exceeded the scope of the warrants, illegally kept on communications that they should have destroyed or returned and made new and warrantless searches of the files.
Kollar-Kotelly on Saturday evening granted Richman’s request for a temporary restraining order, instructing the department “not to access the covered materials once they have been identified, segregated and secured, or to share, disseminate, or disclose the covered materials to any person, without first seeking and obtaining the leave of this Court.”
She gave the Department of Justice until Monday afternoon to certify that she is in compliance with the order.
“Petitioner Richman has also demonstrated that, absent an injunction, he will be irreparably violated by the continued violation of his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizures resulting from the Government’s continued retention of his computer image and related materials,” she wrote.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment Sunday on the ruling and what it meant for the re-indictment of Comey.
It is not clear that the Justice Department can secure new charges against Comey even if it can rely on Richman’s communications. Comey’s lawyers said the statute of limitations on such a case — the congressional testimony in question was given on September 30, 2020, or more than five years ago — has expired.
A separate attempt by the Justice Department to file a new indictment against New York Letitia James, another perceived Trump opponent who was also indicted by Halligan, failed last week when a grand jury refused to sign indictments.